There is no built-in case statement in Perl, but you can build one using a hash and references to subroutines. This is more like a switch, but the principles are the same.

# $action_string is set to something or other.

# actions is a hash whose keys are strings and whose values 
# are references to subroutines

my %actions = ( 
        'display'=> \&show_values(),
        'set'=>    \&set_values(),
        'default' => \&default()
        );

$action_string = 'default'  unless defined($action{$action_string});

$action{$action_string}->(); # calls the subroutine that this hash val
+ue is a reference to

sub set_values {
 # do something
}

sub show_values {
    # do something
}
[download]

Philosophy can be made out of anything. Or less -- Jerry A. Fodor

Cheers,
KM

reading->clues->information->knowledge->wife|kids->wisdom

MitD -- Made in the Dark
'My favourite colour appears to be grey.'

I'm sure this is covered in one of the documents linked in the above posts, but just the same, here's what I usually do to counter my many-else-if blues:

# SWITCH: for(thing to check) {
#     /regexp/ && do { condition 1; last SWITCH; };
#     (condition) && do { condition 2; last SWITCH; };
#     do { catch all };
# }
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This works by setting the default variable ($_) to the thing to check and performing regexps or condition ops on the default variable. The nice thing about this structure is that it's very flexible: you can use an array or scalar as the thing-to-check, you can forego the last statements and have multiple statement blocks apply, you can combine regular expressions with conditional expressions, etc. I use this structure to check for variable types sometimes, sort of a generic want function.

$ref = \@array; # or,
$ref = \%hash; # or,
$ref = \$scalar;

SWITCH: for(ref $ref) { # check variable type of referent 
    # $ref is still our reference scalar
    # now $_ contains the referent variable type
    # (eg, ARRAY, SCALAR, HASH, or object class)

    /array/i && do { 
        # do something with @$ref
        last SWITCH;
    };

    /scalar/i && do {
        # do something with $$ref
        last SWITCH;
    };

    /hash/i && do {
        # do something with %$ref
        last SWITCH;
    };

    do {
        # panic, we have no handler for this variable type!
        die "don't know what to do with ". $_;
    };
}
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Hope this helps!

Alakaboo

Thats totally what I need to do problem is I am so new to perl I am not sure where to do it. I posted the subroutine I am working on to my scratchpad, basically I want to have it break out of that subroutine, the previous coder was much better at perl than I am and has left the company, I understand the qq^ is to output the xml and I think the ^ (caret, means match from first character preceding qq^to itself so its like the endpoint?) anyways I am not sure how to get it to not display. I guess I could setup a switch with completely different modules, based on the other product thats a tremendous amount of work though when all I really want to do is display on the left hand menu a (trying to get to this site click here) A link to a userguide, and a link to some demos, and possibly a help tab to display the help ( I do want it to do the nifty toc thing). Alakaboo, you will totally be my hero if you can help me figure this out, I have been working on it for a week and a half and feel like I am no closer to a resolution than when I began.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker